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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Infamous 2 Review

Score: 5/5

Platform: PS3Length: 15-20 Hours & Another Playthrough as Good or Evil

The original Infamous game on Playstation 3 was one of those games that even though it had some big flaws, it was hard to put down. The game had a great main story line and it felt so awesome to be a major badass throwing lightning bolts and lighting explosions everywhere. Infamous definitely was not a perfect game as it had some repetition and pacing problems but the fun factor kept you playing.

Infamous 2 has been one of my most anticipated sequels due to my love for the first game. I am so glad to say that Infamous 2 improved the game in just about everyway while keeping all the great things in place from the first game. Instead of changing everything or fixing things that were broken, they took their time to add features and mechanics to improve the gameplay experience. The improved graphics engine is very beautiful and offers a much larger variety in lightning, and environments. The in game cut scenes have also been polished by using motion capture to add lifelike animations to the characters.

Infamous did a good job at making you feel like a badass but Infamous 2 takes this much farther with some amazingly fun new powers! Ever want to launch a lightning tornado out of your hands to take out a large group of enemies? Well now you can! The ionic vortex power uses a new resource called ionic charges that drops occasionally on enemies. Each vortex requires one charge and you can carry up to 3 with you at a time. Each vortex uses one charge and can destroy large groups of enemies. The limited “ammo” makes the vortex something you want to wait for the right moment for, instead of spamming. There are other awesome new powers including fire and ice spells that I will leave you to discover on your own.

Ionic Vortex: One of Cole's New Powers

One of the more monotonous features of the first game was the annoying endless waves of enemies and the repetitive side missions. Infamous 2 has done a great job of improving this by limiting the number of these random enemies, increasing enemy variety, and having less repetitive missions. Instead of draining all the bombs off the side of a building 14 times, there are fewer side missions and each one only repeats a couple of times, but after long periods of time. In the first game all the enemies were guys with guns that just happened to wear different costumes. Infamous 2 adds a larger variety of enemies including large mini-bosses, melee monsters, and even other enemies with super powers.

One of Infamous 2's New Mini Bosses

The story in Infamous 2 picks up a little bit after the events of the first game. You are faced with the dilemma of the Beast and must spend the rest of the game preparing to defeat or stop it. The comic book style cut scenes from the first game are back in all their glory and highlight important points in the story. At many points in the game you must decide between good or evil just like the first game that will involve very different ways to complete missions. Your choices will mostly affect only your karma level, but there are 2 distinct good and evil endings that will provide you with 2 unique playthroughs.

One other new feature is the mission creator in which players can create their own side missions. Using an in game level creator like little big planet, players can create custom side missions with cutscenes, scripts, etc. When you finish your side mission, you can upload it and it'll be available in all other player's games if you choose to turn this feature on. The user generated missions will show up on your map as green quests just like regular quests. Completing them awards experience points and counts towards some specific trophies. Most of the quests I played were variations on the same thing: put shit tons of enemies in one place. There were however some very entertaining quests that you can tell some people put a lot of time into.

User Generated Mission in Infamous 2

﻿Overall, Infamous 2 is everything a sequel should be. The game leaves in tact the parts that worked from the first game and fixed the parts that weren’t up to par. All of the new additions to the game including new powers really improve the experience and do well to make you feel like the ultimate bad ass. If you were a fan of the first game, you will absolutely love the sequel. If you didn’t like the first game, I believe they have improved so much that even you will really enjoy Infamous 2. Infamous 2 definitely is going on my must buy list for Playstation 3!